亚马逊Q3财报不及预期，盘后股价大跌7.3%

(My opinion: Google’s and Amazon’s traditional biz are slowing but their cloud and ai business are accelerating sharply. At the present retail run rate of $588bn, it is gonna be much harder to double the retail biz. The law of large numbers will eventually win).)

First Google Search, Now Amazon Retail. Tech’s Moneymakers Are Stumbling.

By Adam Levine and Nate Wolf

Updated Oct 29, 2026 5:43 pm EDT / Original Oct 29, 2026 6:01 am EDT

The investing world revolves around artificial intelligence these days, but Amazon.com on Thursday suffered the same fate as Alphabet the day before. The legacy business that had made it famous underperformed expectations in the third quarter, sending its stock sharply lower.

In Alphabet’s case, it was Google Search that slowed down in the third quarter. For Amazon, results in the company’s retail business weren’t up to snuff.

The reaction highlights how even companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI need to ensure their other business lines are firing on all cylinders. Investors demand nothing less.

Amazon stock dropped 7.3% to $226.12 in after hours trading. Shares were up 5.6% this year entering the earnings report.

The company posted earnings of $1.89 a share for the third quarter, down from $1.95 a year ago and below analysts’ consensus estimate of $1.97, per FactSet. Net sales increased 12% year over year to $201.9 billion, shy of Wall Street’s call for $202.2 billion.

Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud business, is chugging along. Amazon invented the modern cloud business and it is still the largest. AWS revenue surged 39% year over year to $46 billion in the third quarter, above analysts’ estimates.

The company said Thursday that it believes AWS can grow revenue “north of 40%” each year in 2027 and 2028 and be a “trillion-dollar revenue business” in five to 10 years.

That isn’t to say AWS is perfect. The costs of its artificial-intelligence data center buildout led to a third-consecutive quarter of negative free cash flow for Amazon. The company also held its capital expenditure estimate for 2026—at times a pain point for investors—at $220 billion.

But Alphabet earnings on Wednesday taught us that cloud isn’t the only thing on investors’ minds. Google Cloud had an outstanding quarter, with sales doubling from last year—well ahead of expectations—and operating margin coming in at 38%, 2.3 percentage points higher than the Wall Street consensus estimate. But its core advertising business in Search and YouTube faltered.

Amazon suffered a similar fate with its retail business. North America segment sales rose 6% year over year to $112.9 billion, shy of the $113.2 billion analysts had forecast. International segment sales jumped 5% to $43.1 billion, about half a billion dollars below estimates. Like Google, Amazon’s advertising business also showed weakness, with annual growth decelerating to 12% from 26% the quarter before.

Some weakness was already expected coming into the earnings print. Amazon’s annual summer sale event, Prime Day, was pushed forward into the second quarter so as to not conflict with the FIFA World Cup in July. On the advertising front, the third quarter didn’t include any ad revenue from Amazon Prime’s NBA broadcasts, unlike the second quarter, Amazon pointed out.

Things won’t necessarily perk up right away, though, as Amazon’s fourth-quarter outlook also disappointed. The company expects operating income of $31 billion at the midpoint in the current fourth quarter, well below the $33.2 billion analysts had anticipated.

On top of Amazon’s retail and advertising base, investors will also be watching carefully for any slippage at AWS given the huge investments involved.

“AWS acceleration makes the AI investment easier to justify, but it doesn’t make the cost disappear,” said Jake Behan, head of capital markets at Direxion, a provider of exchange-traded funds. “Free cash flow remains under significant pressure from the buildout.”

On Monday, AWS’s Anthropic counterparty risk came into sharp focus with the release of the startup’s prospectus for its initial public offering, which mentioned Amazon and AWS 166 times. The inflection in AWS growth rates coincided with Anthropic’s sales surge, and it has been key to the unit’s recent success.

Amazon is a competitor to Anthropic, a distributor, a customer, a vendor, and after its initial public offering will also be a greater-than-5% shareholder. The biggest risk is Anthropic’s $110 billion 10-year AWS contract, one of many cloud deals the start-up has. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, SpaceX, Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom and Lambda are all counting on Anthropic being able to pay large bills in the future, and should it falter, the dominoes will fall.

Write to Adam Levine at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) and Nate Wolf at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])